What is this crap I am reading? There is some kind of ivory tower involved with the "ITU" nerds who made h.264 compression. The deblocking is what interests me. How did they do it? It's like magic and these wizards refuse to share their spells. If you ask me, 2048x1024 progressive (at any framerate) with 16x16 luma blocks and 32x32 chroma blocks, plus this magical "deblocking" with equal R/G/B color representation which would equate to 8 bits per channel if uncompressed, and the inter-frames NOT having 2D transforms (they give me nightmares), and maybe about 1/3 second keyframe placement (or more frequent), that would be great for the video stream, basically like a low-loss JPEG sequence with some magical trickery to get the file size down that doesn't produce weird artifacts. H.265 is going in the wrong direction. H.264 has a built-in deblocking filter but relies heavily on 2D transforms. I want deblocking WITHOUT 2D transforms, at a high resolution without the enormous file sizes that would result from a literal JPEG frame sequence. Can it be done? In theory, I have no idea. Lossless coding works because of correction frames, but what about low-loss without artifacts? I mean, I'm not just going to dial down the resolution. Maybe parts of the image could be lower-res (high noise areas) and a film grain effect could be added by the playback system. The goal is to emulate film for an extremely low cost.

What I'm trying to say is that digital cinema is the future purely for economic reasons, and these elitists need to accept that. Film has always been a business, and if you ask me a business environment is perfect for art. Just look at Star Wars. They made that for 10 million dollars in a time when computer editing of films did not exist. Nowadays, you can color screen this, color grade that, composite, CGI, edit, and (in limited capacity) distribute, all for free. Back then, that was closer to a 50 million dollar operation. Star Wars was only made because they found a way to make it cheaply. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey. They didn't want to build real space ships, so they did it all on mechanical sets. Remarkable. Why should anyone pay for film stock? Why should anyone pay for large crews? Porn stars cost so much damn money that there is hardly any left once you've got the 30-alien orgy going. Porn is mostly made digitally now, and it looks better than film. If the cost of actors/porn stars could be negated, we would be seeing a lot more high-quality porn. We all need to work together to reach this goal.

Actual video recording should be mentioned too. I would say that AVCHD 2.0 Progressive is "good enough" for most capture purposes if the theater is what you have in mind. Older HD standards hold up pretty well too, but only when you get up to about 30 mbps do those horrible 2D transform h.264 artifacts disappear. When actually distributing to theaters, it becomes necessary to retain about the same bitrate (except at lower resolutions), so you end up having to give out physical media. It would be worth it for me to buy 20 GB worth of storage for a theater if they would show my independent film for free, but any other expenses would just be too much. I am retired, and I carnt afford all that expensive poo poo. 28 Days Later was largely shot in what you now call "standard" (low) definition. That worked fine, and I love that film. Nowadays, "low budget" is The Hurt Locker, where they've got multiple 16mm cameras set up. I don't know about you, but that sounds fairly high budget to me. To be "indie", you have to go into it with an extremely small amount of money and come out of it with an extremely small amount of money, and even then you don't have to go for that "indie" art style that plagues so many movies. Either you make a "real" movie or you go home.

Update: A quick Internet search informed me that digital cinema distribution is done almost exclusively over the Internet. Entire movies sent over the airwaves! So, if we're talking about a 20 GB file, the distributor is paying for meaty upstream Internet service, and the theater has 2 mbps downstream, it would take something in the ballpark of 1-2 days to transfer, from the moment the theater requests the file to the moment they can play/watch it. That's amazing! I never thought that such would be viable for getting movies out there, but it sure beats film reel distribution by leaps and bounds. If the film maker is using equipment he already owns and has a deal worked out with several theaters, the only expense in the whole process is time, and that is something that "indies" have a lot of.

Also, 22 hours is in the ballpark of 1-2 days, so I carnt understand why you would get so upset unless you have severe emotional problems, in which case please continue posting in my threads as it gives me something to reply to when I have nothing else to do. Boy, does this pass the time.

Yes, I did the math. I knew the length of time it would take, but often Internet connections fall shy of advertised speeds by as much as 20%. I could have said "one day" (as in 24 hours) but I figured that since the theater employees would probably go home instead of sitting and waiting for 24 frickING HOURS (considering how the the sun seemingly revolves around our planet, hence night) I would call that period of time "one to two days". After all, they could start the download on Thursday morning and it wouldn't be done until Friday. Sure, one day has elapsed, but simply saying "one day" would imply that you could screen the damn film on the same day that you start downloading it, which simply isn't true (unless you want to cut it really close and never sleep). It's a two day process even if it doesn't take up a full two days.

Now, let's assume that the theater in question has some crazy fast internet and can download the file in a little over an hour (assuming the studio/distributor's upstream bandwidth wasn't swamped). It would still take some time to plug it into the projector, prepare your box office info, et cetera. That's at least a (work) day (that may fall shy of 8 hours).

In either case, it's a one to two day process, which is still faster than shipping or hand-delivering reels, by a lot. I'm just saying that technology isn't magic. Distributors have to do a lot of work, and indies without distribution have to do it all themselves, unless they basically want to surrender the rights for free. In an ideal world, there would be lots of theaters just BEGGING to show independent films because people would line up out the doors to see them, but due to the costs of advertising that probably won't happen very much ever.

You're still wrong because I have a poo pooty 10 megabit per second connection, I'm pretty sure an industry which fricking depends on the infrastructure would have a connection faster than my horrible home connection

Svetlana, a "poo pooty" 10 mbps (downstream) connection is like a really good 1.5 mbps connection. Either way, the speeds available to you in your home are about equal to what is available to most theaters. It's still fast enough if you want to transfer a film when you compare it to the turnaround times of actual film reels. Anyhow, I wouldn't call a theater "industry". No, the industry is in the distribution. The actual distribution houses probably have some amazing upstream bandwidth. They would have to in order to reach the thousands of theaters they target. Just look at this math I did:

The thing is, in theory with a crappy internet connection upstream 0.5 mbps it would take 4 days to transfer a file to one theater, and your bandwidth can only take one 0.5 mbps dick up its ass, so that's 4 days per theater, and you want to target at least 500 theaters so it would take in theory 5.47 years just to send your movie to theaters, by which point everybody would have long forgotten about your movie. Now let's assume that you're using x265 which (though crappy) can give you lossy compression at half the bitrate per subjective quality (I don't know how that is measured but my guess is it's tested on legally blind grandmas). So fine, that's 10 GB per movie and it takes 2.735 years to send your movie to all of the theaters. That's still too long, so this is where we start getting creative.

Your typical YIFY rip is 700 MB with h.264 compression. (Albeit that's at 720p but let's assume 2K would look the same at that bitrate). People say they look terrible so let's up it to 1 GB (oh yeah big difference, shut up). DIVIDE THAT IN HALF since we're using the ALMIGHTY x265 and we're down to 500 MB for a poo pooty looking compressed video file that still beats the crappy 16mm print I saw 47 Ronin in (seriously it wasn't even anamorphic; a 16mm print that didn't even occupy a full frame and was projected in a theater at which I had to pay TWO WHOLE DOLLARS). So yeah, we have now divided the amount of time by 20. It should now take 50 days to distribute to all of the theaters, which if you ask me is still TOO frickING LONG. We can't shrink the file any more or it will look terrible, so why not shrink the actual resolution? According to a Wikipedia page, 640x360 is "HD". That's pretty impressive considering that's at a lower resolution than a lot of broadcast signals, so are we to assume that HDTV has been around since the 1930s? Sure, I'll take it. If you wanted to project at 640x360 (sub-DVD quality), that sure would shrink the file, but why stop there? A ratio I keep hearing of is 2.35:1. So, 640x272. That's pathetic, but if you constrain the 4:3 Star Wars DVDs to square pixels, that is the resolution you end up with (seriously, I measured it).

So, the question is, how poo pooty of an image can you get away with? Does anybody here work in a theater? I would like to know just what quality/resolution you are projecting in (especially for the smaller theaters) because I bet that 2K/1080p and especially 4K are very generous considering what I've seen in the budget theaters. Seriously, a lot of places just show DVDs. I'm just saying.